Richard Morris, Authorhttps://richardmorrisauthor.wordpress.com
Richard Morris, author and songwriter
Sat, 17 Nov 2018 03:19:38 +0000 en
hourly
1 http://wordpress.com/https://s0.wp.com/i/buttonw-com.pngRichard Morris, Authorhttps://richardmorrisauthor.wordpress.com
Representing the authorhttps://richardmorrisauthor.wordpress.com/2018/11/16/representing-the-author/
https://richardmorrisauthor.wordpress.com/2018/11/16/representing-the-author/#commentsFri, 16 Nov 2018 23:12:53 +0000http://richardmorrisauthor.wordpress.com/?p=7380Continue reading →]]>Well Considered by Richard Morris was the book discussed this week at a local book club in Prince George’s County, MD. The author’s wife was invited to attend and comment regarding the writing of the novel which Morris published in 2010.

Random papers and selected artifacts pulled for “show-and-tell” were revealing, even for someone this close to the writing and research for the novel. One such paper was a table compiled by the author, “Resident Population by Race, Prince George’s County,” which not only illustrated “white flight,” in which 316,648 white residents left the County between 1970 and 2002, but also that the Black population was at 68.57% (of 20,589) in 1810, declined to 8.68% (of 357,395) in 1960, and by 2002 was back up to 64.40% (of 833,677).

Another artifact was a newspaper report from the 2006 Washington Post, in Richard Morris’s files but unable to be located online, titled “Racial Slurs Make For Ugly Commute” by Ovetta Wiggins. Obviously the basis for the opening scene of Well Considered, the newspaper article described that, “Racist slurs spray-painted on a church and a nearby sound barrier disrupted the morning commute on Route 450 in Bowie yesterday, with several drivers pulling over to the side of the road to stare in disbelief … Traffic slowed to a crawl as drivers strained to get a better look, shook their heads and urgently dialed their cellphones … Members of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization that tracks hate groups, characterized the graffiti as the worst they had seen in the Washington Area in 15 years.”

Book club members remembered this scene from the book and had not realized how fact-based it was. They remembered thinking while reading that passers-by would not have paid much attention to the hate-filled graffiti. This is probably more a testament to the times in which we live … that such an act shocked thousands of commuters on a busy thoroughfare in 2006, but in 2018 events include at least this level of hate in the daily news palette. Even the author’s wife had forgotten how closely the fiction of Well Considered mirrored the facts reported in the Washington Post.

There were sets of printouts representing Maryland and California (states in the book), as well as other states and D.C., listing Jim Crow laws and their dates. From Maryland, (1870) “Taxes paid by colored people shall be set aside for maintaining schools for colored children;” (1872) “Schools to be established for colored children. No colored school shall be established in a district unless the colored population warrants;” (1884) Prohibited all marriages between white persons and Negroes and persons of Negro descent to third generation inclusive … subject to imprisonment between 18 months to ten years;” (1904) “All railroad companies required to provide separate cars or coaches for white and colored passengers;” (1904) “Steamboats … separate areas …;” (1908) “Steamboats … separate toilets … and sleeping cabins;” (1908) “Streetcars … separate seats;” (1924) “Miscegenation declared a felony;” (1924) “Required racially segregated schools,” etc., including (1955) “any white woman who delivered a child conceived with a Negro or mulatto would be sentenced to the penitentiary for 18 months to five years.”

There was an article about an African American community that served as a significant setting in the novel. This “retreat” never applied for incorporation and is not one of the Historic Black Townships (North Brentwood, Fairmount Heights, Glenarden, and Eagle Harbor) portrayed in “A Space of Their Own” brochure and exhibition of the Prince George’s African American Museum & Cultural Center at North Brentwood, Inc.

After a positive comment about the amount of detail provided regarding daily life in the historical parts of the novel, the author’s wife revealed that the original intent was for a book with a sequel. The history intended for the sequel was incorporated to make a book that seems to come to an end but then takes off again with a plot twist binding the two books together.

There was a discussion about lynchings and some of the underlying reasons for them, such as land grabs. The book club guest suggested that members read Sycamore Row by John Grisham (2013) for a novel with a story similar to Well Considered but told from a different point of view and in Mississippi instead of Maryland.

A question regarding the ending of Well Considered led to a comparison/contrast with Morris’s final novel, Masjid Morning. Throughout the discussion, some of the more questionable characters or events turned out to be the ones which were actually based in reality. Again, truth is stranger than fiction.

“Over the years, I’ve become used to people wanting to know what he would have thought about something in the news, or assign a way of thinking to him based on what they know about who he was at 27. They want to freeze him in time. I find it ironic because Pat was always known as a free thinker who was constantly growing. He was very different when we got together at 16 from who he was at 27, and he would have been different, too, at 42.”

Marie Tillman writes, “Pat lived his life with passion and respected this quality in others, once writing that, ‘to err on the side of passion is human and right and the only way I’ll live.'” Richard Morris was also passionate, especially when researching and inserting into novels the social justice issues that concerned him.

Marie Tillman continues, “Since last year, I’ve watched from the background as professional athletes have taken a knee to draw attention to injustice and racial inequality in the United States. Pat was in the military, so many people want to attach a brand of blind allegiance to him and use him to argue that kneeling during the national anthem is unpatriotic. Pat was also against the Iraq War, so many others want to use him to argue against American involvement in overseas wars. His essence is bent to fit an agenda.” Luckily, Richard Morris was not an icon whose memory can easily be manipulated. Additionally, since his death was less than one year ago, he has already spoken with regard to many current political issues and interpretations.

Thank you for your service, Pat Tillman and Richard Morris and all the others.

Songs I wrote in Vietnam in 1967 (my diary)

]]>https://richardmorrisauthor.wordpress.com/2018/11/11/veterans-day-recognition-and-appreciation-for-pat-tillman/feed/0richardmorrisauthorskycoverCamp Radcliffhttps://richardmorrisauthor.wordpress.com/2018/11/10/camp-radcliff/
https://richardmorrisauthor.wordpress.com/2018/11/10/camp-radcliff/#respondSun, 11 Nov 2018 00:46:37 +0000http://richardmorrisauthor.wordpress.com/?p=7359Continue reading →]]>1st Cavalry Division Association 2019 calendar arrived today. Featured on the front is Camp Radcliff, Vietnam. Although Richard Morris’s Vietnam war satire, Cologne No. 10 for Men, refers to Camp Radcliff as Camp Vassar, Camp Radcliff was actually named for Major Donald Radcliff, the First Cavalry’s first combat death, and not the “Seven Sisters” college with similar spelling. Morris wrote about Camp Radcliff in his blog post “Fact or Fiction in Vietnam” https://richardmorrisauthor.wordpress.com/2014/10/22/fact-or-fiction-in-vietnam/. Interchanging satirical names with actual names, Morris described the real Camp Radcliff:

Another interesting article http://www.historynet.com/easy-living-in-a-hard-war-behind-the-lines-in-vietnam.htm describes the shopping at Camp Radcliff, “As a reporter for a division newspaper raved about the P.X. at Camp Radcliff in the Central Highlands of Vietnam: “There are a lot of shopping centers—in fact, whole towns—back in the world where you couldn’t find snuff, anchovies, baby oil, dice, flash bulbs, radios, and steak sauce in the same store, or even in the same general area. But at Camp Radcliff you can buy almost anything you want.” This article is a fascinating piece that describes the two different wars in Vietnam, that of the “REMFs” and that of the “grunts.”

“Make plans now.The Memorial Day Writers Project will hold its biannual reading on the National Mall this coming Veterans Day (Nov 11, 2018) from 11:30 am to 5:30 pm. We’ll be behind the sidewalk near 20 St. and Constitution Ave.Authors:bring extra copies of your books to sell.This is our 25th year on the Mall where we honor our veterans by celebrating and recalling their experiences through prose, poetry and song.Tell a few friends and join us as we share our memories of good times and hard times in service to our country.”

Richard Morris will not be there to read from Cologne No. 10 for Men and to sing from Skytroopers: Songs of war, peace, and love from Vietnam.

]]>https://richardmorrisauthor.wordpress.com/2018/11/09/harvard-magazine-has-arrived/feed/0richardmorrisauthorArtboard 2What fun!https://richardmorrisauthor.wordpress.com/2018/11/07/what-fun/
https://richardmorrisauthor.wordpress.com/2018/11/07/what-fun/#respondWed, 07 Nov 2018 20:52:08 +0000http://richardmorrisauthor.wordpress.com/?p=7326Continue reading →]]>A friend recently posted to Facebook (along with the notation of having himself done drawings in the link — not the 1908 catalog! — as a student 31 years ago):

From NPR: The Sears Modern Homes catalog debuted in 1908, and it offered all the material and blueprints needed to build a house. The pieces that arrived in the mail were meant to fit together sort of like LEGOs, so buyers could build the houses themselves or hire contractors.

In the early 1900s, Sears sold thousands of homes around the U.S. through its mail-order catalogs. Many of those houses are still around, and their owners are saddened by the retailer’s bankruptcy.

That’s Amy’s house! Amy is one of the protagonists in Masjid Morning by Richard Morris. He studied these homes while he was writing the novel. The one in this picture looks like the front of Amy Breckenridge’s home that Morris described on page 8 when she returns home after meeting Atif: “Her eyes swept across the stately two-story portico supported by six white columns with Corinthian scroll tops.” He refers to a sunroom on the right and a carport on the left.

Recent evidence from Richard Morris’s computer verified that Amy lived in a Sears Magnolia with a recent addition.

What fun to imagine Amy driving through the carport and entering the garage and the house addition at the rear. One can follow Amy on the floorplan up the stairs, past Jesse’s room, to her own room on the back of the house with the sleeping porch overlooking the addition. It is easy to picture her in her deep dressing room eavesdropping on her father’s meeting in the addition’s “trophy room.” Poor Amy — looks like she has to share a bathroom with her parents while Jesse has one to himself.

Imagine all the research and planning that went into this small part of a novel! You might enjoy printing the floorplan map to accompany you when you read Masjid Morning.

In what ways is the floorplan essential to the plot of the story? Perhaps only to architects, builders, and other house-savvy people who might be mentally distracted if the layout of the house didn’t fit together!

Our favorite builder says of Masjid Morning, “The book moves effortlessly between technical descriptions of a mosque rising from the ground like a living being and the emotional struggles between religions.” — Jay Endelman

]]>https://richardmorrisauthor.wordpress.com/2018/11/07/what-fun/feed/0richardmorrisauthorIf your church romanticizes …https://richardmorrisauthor.wordpress.com/2018/10/30/if-your-church-romanticizes/
https://richardmorrisauthor.wordpress.com/2018/10/30/if-your-church-romanticizes/#respondTue, 30 Oct 2018 16:03:15 +0000http://richardmorrisauthor.wordpress.com/?p=7322Continue reading →]]>“If your church romanticizes the Hondurans they reach out to on short term mission trips, but demonizes the Hondurans seeking asylum in a refugee caravan, it might be time to re-examine what mission is really all about” is going around on Facebook currently.

Some readers of Masjid Morning by Richard Morris questioned whether character Randall, Amy’s father, was realistic enough — that they did not know people like this in their churches and in their lives.

Here is an excerpt:

That night, when they were getting ready for bed, Eunice told Randall, “Maybe we need to get her away from here—get her mind on other things.”

“What—like to a camp or something?”

“Yes, but I think that would be too short. She needs to be away from this boy for a long time.”

“You think it is a boy, then?” he asked.

“It has to be, the way she’s acting. And I think it’s a Muslim boy.”

“God save us!” he said, pulling his pajama top over his head.

“It’s probably too late for her to become a camp counselor somewhere—camps are probably staffed up.”

“Maybe we could have her volunteer for a work camp,” he suggested, “building houses somewhere.”

“That’s an idea. I think Habitat’s still working along the Gulf Coast and in Haiti.”

He took off his watch and put it on the end table. “But I don’t think we want her around all those black people, do we? That would be asking for trouble. We don’t know what might happen to her in either of those places. Why don’t we ask around at church tomorrow about what mission trips are available and see what she might be interested in.”

Masjid Morning was published in 2016. Was Richard Morris ahead of his time in portraying such Christians? Would a reading of Masjid Morning today bring the response, “Right on target!” “Aptly describes …” Did it just take the reality that we could elect Trump as President and have many Christians continue to support him, to make us start to understand the true character of people we might know, love, or respect?

“Obama spoke about the slow-moving migrant caravan from Central America bound for the United States as another example of a Republican scare tactic.

“’Now the latest, they’re trying to convince everybody to be afraid of a bunch of impoverished, malnourished refugees a thousand miles away,’ he said. ‘That’s the thing that is the most important thing in this election,’ he said. ‘Not health care, not whether or not folks are able to retire, doing something about higher wages, rebuilding our roads and bridges and putting people back to work.’

“’Suddenly,’ he continued, changing his voice to a high-pitch to strike a mocking tone, ‘it’s these group of folks. We don’t even know where they are. They’re right down there.’”

Current scare tactics are reminiscent of the main reason many people supported the war in Vietnam — the domino theory.

Protagonist Wilfred Carmenghetti in Cologne No. 10 for Men muses:

“He thought of freedom and democracy and heard the machine-gun clatter of falling dominoes hitting each other, knocking the next to the tabletop. Then he remembered Robert Kennedy’s comment: ‘We’re killing innocent people because the communists are 12,000 miles away, and they might get 11,000 miles away.’ How could that justify the killing?”

Author Richard Morris speaks about the domino theory in his post: https://richardmorrisauthor.wordpress.com/2017/09/18/the-vietnam-war-part-1-on-pbs/

“Between 1920 and 1938, the NAACP flew a flag outside its headquarters on Fifth Avenue in New York City. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS AND NAACP”

“What do we know about these racist attacks and how should we confront this horrific history today?” was the question introducing the Kojo Nnamdi show on WAMU 88.5. Titled “Lynching in Maryland: Confronting a Legacy of Local Violence,” the program asking this question was introduced with “Many people associate the Deep South with lynchings. But at least 40 happened in Maryland.”

This caller answered that initial question in this manner:

“White people tend to know little about the history of lynchings – the postcards depicting lynchings that were freely sent through the mail, the picnic-style settings in which some lynchings took place with a gathering of townspeople including children, and how the ruse of protecting white women covered up other reasons for lynchings, such as greed. We need to make the effort to learn, to teach, to join with Will Schwarz and Nicholas Creary’s (Maryland Lynching Memorial Project) initiative, and to utilize the offer of the Equal Justice Initiative to give us the duplicate columns for the lynchings which occurred in our counties (duplicate columns from EJI’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama).

Research-based fiction is another way to learn and to teach; Well Considered (2010) by Richard Morris is based on a lynching in Prince George’s County, MD, and Sycamore Row (2013) by John Grisham tells the same land-grab story but in Mississippi and from a different point of view. Morris’s research uncovered more Maryland lynchings than are identified by the Equal Justice Initiative, but EJI had stricter criteria for what qualified.”

EJI’s criteria included “African Americans killed by two or more Caucasian Americans between 1877 and 1950 and individuals whose murders could be documented with two or more primary sources.”

]]>https://richardmorrisauthor.wordpress.com/2018/10/25/lynching-in-maryland/feed/0richardmorrisauthorBetween 1920 and 1938, the NAACP flew a flag outside its headquarters on Fifth Avenue in New York City.Zombie Visibilityhttps://richardmorrisauthor.wordpress.com/2018/10/13/zombie-visibility/
https://richardmorrisauthor.wordpress.com/2018/10/13/zombie-visibility/#commentsSat, 13 Oct 2018 23:14:13 +0000http://richardmorrisauthor.wordpress.com/?p=7289Continue reading →]]>A year ago Richard Morris continued his support of the Hyattsville Elementary School PTA Zombie Run fundraiser as a Gold Sponsor; two weeks later he had a fall on October 26, followed by emergency surgery and complications. He died November 21, 2017. My memorial to him has been to keep his legacy visible, especially in the form of his books and songs. I am Barbara, his partner and wife of fifty years.

This blog now functions as Blog B, whether B for Barbara or B as secondary to the two hundred wonderful posts Richard left to us in his original blog. Today Richard Morris was a Gold-Sponsor-in-memory at the Hyattsville Elementary School PTA Zombie Run.

As a sponsor, there was a tent where I could display Richard’s novels and CD. In addition, I took our Sy Mohr painting of Hyattsville to amuse the community in identifying locations. Although Sy died in 2016, Richard was his webmaster and had previously established and maintained Sy Mohr’s website: http://www.symohr.wordpress.com.

I also displayed Richard’s mementos from his two runs in the Marine Corps Marathon. Although we started out with light rain, that never keeps Hyattsville from supporting the Zombie Run. I was able to send home with hundreds of runners in their packet bags a card showing the beautiful poster display of Richard’s books (Cologne No. 10 for Men, Well Considered, Canoedling in Cleveland, and Masjid Morning) on the front and information about him on the back.